What to do when importing fails with "… because you don't have permission to access…"

We have received a few reports of an issue where importing manuscript documents can fail with an error message of the sort "couldn’t be copied because you don’t have permission to access "…". This issue is rare and can happen due to Manuscripts using the macOS sandbox security model, and macOS itself putting the location it provides for Manuscripts for files it needs for optimising its performance, temporary file storage etc in a state where it doesn't have permission to it – most unfortunate!

Clearing the settings and cache directory created by Manuscripts application fortunately helps with this issue. To clear Manuscripts into its "factory settings", please complete the following steps:

Open Finder.

Go > Go To Folder (or hit Shift+Command+G)

Enter ~/Library/Containers into the window that opened and then click "Go"

Once you've done that your Finder window should be now in a folder where you see the folder "com.manuscripts.Manuscripts".

Please drag the folder com.manuscripts.Manuscripts into Trash (this clears the cache directory that contains safely deletable information that improves the performance of Manuscripts and which it uses when exporting documents, etc).

Open /Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app

Copy and paste the following into the terminal window, and hit Enter after:

defaults delete com.manuscripts.Manuscripts

couldn’t be copied because you don’t have permission to access “C2E9CF25”.

@aron-kondoro hmm, what kind of a file format are you attempting to import? Would you be able to send that file to us, please? With this information only thing I can suggest is running Disk Utility and repairing file permissions on the volume (it's always a good thing to run that every now and then on macOS, as computer crashes etc can lead to permission data corrupting).

It's still relatively unlikely this would be causing the issue you have thuogh. Another possibility is that you genuinely don't have the permission to read the file you are trying to import of course. Can you read it without an administrator password being requested with other apps? If you are comfortable sending the file to us, we'd be happy to take a look at it via support@manuscriptsapp.com (1:1 support where we keep everything we receive private).

Hi there,
I aswell have the problem when trying to import Papers3 Library. The error shown is: Failed to process data because of an underlying error:
DueToUnderlyingError(Error Domain=MPBookmarkStoreErrorDomain Code=1 "Cancelled while requesting access to "com.manuscripts.Manuscripts"" UserInfo={NSLocalizedDescription=Cancelled while requesting access to "com.manuscripts.Manuscripts"}).
Please contact support@manuscriptsapp.com if this persists.
... which I herewith do. Which more information do you need to help.
Kind regards from Germany
Martin